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The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Alejandra Prieto’s Pyrite Mirror (2018), on view in Heavy Metal, is over seven feet in height. The metal mirror is made from pyrite—often called “fool’s gold”—resin, and wood. She based her work on mirrors made by the ancient peoples of Central and South America. Because of this connection to the past, Prieto says that her mirror “functions as a contemporary ruin that activates the past in the present, thus making visible the transience of our present time.”

The artist has made several versions of Pyrite Mirror, and each has a unique web of cracks and imperfections. They interrupt the reflection of the viewer observing the piece, and draw attention to the materiality of the mirror. Often, when looking at mirrors, viewers can only focus on their reflection, or the details of the object, one at a time. But with Prieto’s mirrors, the viewer sees both at once. Indeed, the work forces the viewer to confront the mirror as an object, instead of merely examining their own image.

The artist often uses coal in her sculptures, and she has also created mirrors out of this material, which was also used for mirrors in ancient cultures. Her coal and pyrite mirrors likewise encourage contemplation on the history and nature of the mirror—now a ubiquitous item, it was once an uncommon luxury. Her other coal sculptures of everyday objects include a chandelier, sneakers, gloves, a belt, shoes, and a carpet. Like her mirrors, these carvings display the artist’s incredible attention to detail and are slightly reflective. Prieto’s surprising sculptures make the viewer reconsider humble materials and aesthetics, as well as the human history of crafting and using objects.

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Pewter was commonplace in colonial homes in the form of practical objects like plates and tankards. Today, pewter is often used to make souvenir spoons, wizard figurines, and other trinkets. I am constantly negotiating this associated space, as kitsch and fantasy meet the colonial American home, when I am making my work. I love both the reverence and sense of play that these associations carry.

2. How do your works on view in Heavy Metal fit into your larger body of work?

The works Touchmarks: Made in India (2009), As it Comes to Bear (2015), and Between: Kitchenaid Mixer (2017) share a common thread. I took common-but-overlooked objects (Styrofoam inserts, keychains, and plastic baskets) and translated them through material and form. These works, like most I create, use a similar making methodology of fragmenting an object, then molding and casting it in pewter. Once I have a good stockpile of castings, I cut, piece, and solder them together.

3. As an artist, what is your most essential tool? Why?

My three-wheel vintage Craftsman bandsaw is my most useful tool. It expedites my process by making quick, straight cuts to my castings. I am fascinated by the way people adapt objects to fit their needs. When I bought this bandsaw on Craigslist, it was outfitted with a DIY motor taken from a treadmill. I fell in love with two disparate objects of use becoming one.

I am drawn to what people leave behind and what those traces can tell us about our relationships to things and to one another. My work relies on things people use out of delight, need, or convenience. Sometimes tracing one’s habits of buying and throwing away—or imagining why something is made, and how—guide my work.

5. What is the last exhibition you saw that you had a strong reaction to?

In 2013, I visited Ann Hamilton’s installation the event of a thread at the Armory in New York. Hamilton took a spacious drill hall and turned it into a place where intimate yet connected interactions occurred. Objects became facilitators that connected the viewers. It was unexpectedly moving, and that is likely why it has stayed with me.

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

What I love most about working with metal is the material’s reflectivity. Because I use thousands of metal parts to make my work, there are thousands of points for light to potentially bounce. Consequently, the works notably change, as the light changes.

2. How do your works on view in Heavy Metal fit into your larger body of work?

I like my work to appear as if it grew itself, as if the materials reproduced and multiplied. This illusion is suggested in some of my installations; the materials seeming to colonize and take over space. The works in Heavy Metal attempt to suggest this colonizing, within the object or grid.

3. As an artist, what is your most essential tool? Why?

I’m informed by the layers and levels of seeing. These days my most essential tool is my magnifying glasses, but research and dialogue also intensify my seeing.

Unquantifiable quantities inspire me. I’m deeply moved when looking into a Gaylord box filled with used can tabs, when seeing schools of fish or swarms of insects, or when I’m part of mid-day pedestrian traffic. Perceiving overwhelming numbers of things likens to experiences of the infinite.

5. What is the last exhibition you saw that you had a strong reaction to?

Laurie Anderson’s show at Guild Hall literally had me questioning the ground I stand on. Her work makes me rethink spatial awareness like no other.

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

I fell in love with metal as a child, after finding a copper cable that had blown into my parents’ garden. I like its plasticity. Metal is almost like clay, but harder and more precise.

2. How do your works on view in Heavy Metal fit into your larger body of work?

Plant growth has always inspired me. These works are no exception. The containers of the sake pot with cups (2017) and of my Water Lily (2013) are inspired by the fleshy, juicy fruit of yellow water lilies. I added airy, three-dimensional lines, like those found in trees and tendrils.

3. As an artist, what is your most essential tool? Why?

When working with metal you never use just one tool. Some of my most essential tools are my goldsmith saw, my rough titanium-coated file, and my favorite light planishing hammer. But, as an artist, it is all in the eye.

In my work I investigate the place of silver in everyday life. For me, the utility of objects is intimately associated with the artistic experience. Function is important. When it comes to the shape of my works, I’m inspired by plants and the way they move, and the way metal really wants to move in the same way.

5. What is the last exhibition you saw that you had a strong reaction to?

It was really not an exhibition at all. I visited one of the few old-growth forests left in Sweden with a skilled botanist. The forest, untouched by humans, is awe-inspiring.

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

I love understanding the properties and characteristics of each metal that I work with. I encourage the material to do what it wants to do naturally. I feel like metal communicates so clearly. Over the years I’ve learned to listen carefully and respond accordingly. But that isn’t to say we don’t argue. Metal can be stubborn—but so can I.

2. How do your works on view in Heavy Metalfit into your larger body of work?

The work in Heavy Metal is pivotal to my studio practice today. These pieces were the first time I explored techniques and larger scales that were unfamiliar to me as a jeweler. Falling in Love: 1999 (2011–13) was the first time I used collected material rather than generating my own. Now, I often work with trash including used coffee lids, collected bottle and container lids, and other unwanted items easily gathered from my community. I connect my work to the outside world.

As an artist my most essential tool is my curiosity. In the studio, I am driven to create things that I would not otherwise see, to understand things I can’t fully grasp. This is my drive as an artist. Any physical tool would be useless without this state of mind.

4. Who or what are your sources of inspiration and influence?

Inspiration and influence change as my work changes over time. These days, I am often motivated by my concerns for the environment and our collective habits of consumption.

5. What is the last exhibition you saw that you had a strong reaction to?

The Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University recently held its grand opening with Declaration. I was incredibly moved by Cassils’s Inextinguishable Fire (2015) and Paul Rucker’s Storm in the Time of Shelter.

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Self-adornment through jewelry has a long history. That fascinating history is something that profoundly interests artist Lola Brooks. “I believe in the power of jewelry’s intimate scale and symbiotic reliance on the body, and the fact that its beauty and materiality have always been poisoned by a shameless celebration of wealth, excess, and debaucheries,” says Brooks.

Brooks is known for her large and enigmatic wearable pieces, five of which are featured in Heavy Metal. Each contains some of the artist’s favorite motifs including hearts, roses, ruffles and bows—all classic romantic symbols. However, Brooks’s works contain a subtly edgy and dark quality. Take the dripping tear edged in vermillion coral in the heart of sacredheartknot (2015) or the macabre quality of the dead quails in twointhehand (2015), chained in an endless embrace.

Some of the interesting materials like these taxidermy birds come from Brooks’s interest in collecting everything from vintage accessories, potted meats, and plaid pantsuits. Another work, byebabybunting (2015), features a children’s vintage rabbit fur muff and antique ivory. “I find power in accumulation,” says the artist. ”It is an inextricable piece of who I am in the world. With only a few things, I tuck them away to keep safe…If I am lucky, they will become a hoard.”

Brooks combines these varied materials with metals and stones of different values including gold, stainless steel, silver, and diamonds, in a way that questions material hierarchy. She often inverts expectations, by using the more precious material such as gold as solder for stainless steel. In a culture that often measures jewelry’s value by the volume of its precious materials, Brooks upends expectations.

Brooks’s intricate works make viewers wonder, and that is precisely the artist’s intent. “I have tossed out the safety of the abstract in favor of the obvious,” says Brooks, “in hopes that people may dig a little deeper into what they think they understand, discovering the mysteries that my arrow is aimed at, buried alive somewhere within that saccharine shell of cliché.”

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Metal acts as a mirror when it is reflective. My use of high-gloss silver nitrate on melted lead crystal distorts the reflections of viewers as they peer into the surface of one of my sculptures. I also work in a Renaissance-era drawing medium called metalpoint. Using metal as a drawing tool creates the potential for an over-the-top level of precision that informs the sense of opulence in my work.

2. How do your works on view in Heavy Metal fit into your larger body of work?

My work in Heavy Metal builds on my current interests: mainstream womanhood, notions of desire, commodity culture, class, and excess. Using lead crystal as subject matter in my drawings and sculptures allows me to mine the history of still-life alongside an examination of the ways in which idealized (and distorted) forms of femininity are bought, sold, consumed, and mass-produced.

3. As an artist, what is your most essential tool? Why?

Ebay. It’s a great tool for observing the detritus of our domestic culture. Most of the crystal I buy looks dated, and there often isn’t a demand for it. These objects become a burden on people. Lead crystal is technically valuable, and yet there is no market for other people’s unwanted heirlooms. Sometimes I suspect that I am the only one buying it.

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Metal allows you to do almost anything if you know how to work with it. I love that it is an industrial material that I can transform into objects, sculptures, and installations that seem organic and that can be viewed as a different material. That creates a sense of mystery that is important in art.

2. How do your works on view in Heavy Metal fit into your larger body of work?

The pieces chosen for Heavy Metal are from the series of my work called “Landscapes.” In this series I explore two-dimensional space with sculptural elements that I use in my other works. I create different layers by incorporating the painted background and the directional lines that I use to create my compositions on the wall. My works tell a story that can be interpreted in different ways by the viewer.

3. As an artist, what is your most essential tool? Why?

My most essential tools are my brain and my heart. Materials and tools are secondary if you don’t have your heart and your brain to process and to express yourself.

I draw influence from everyday life, my personal experiences, and my search for balance between opposites. I look for answers about why we are here, what are we made of, how the universe works, and how we interact with each other.

5. What is the last exhibition you saw that you had a strong reaction to?

William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance impacted me because of his use of repetition. Through layering drawing, movement, and music, Kentridge conveys that migration, illness, and death are inevitable, but humans continue to hope despite it all.

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Metal is an amazing shapeshifter that can be endlessly re-formed, from solid to liquid and back to solid. I love the idea that the metal I work with has an unseen history. It was once part of the regalia of ancient royalty, or a simple circle worn for decades around your grandmother’s finger. Because we carry it, use it to mark occasions, and re-form it to suit the needs of its user, metal continually bares witness to individual lives and the history of humanity.

2. How do your works on view in Heavy Metal fit into your larger body of work?

I am currently exploring contemporary forms of portable wealth. For millennia, jewelry has been an important means of transporting wealth. Material value plays an important role, but it is not the only value jewelry holds. Jewelry can reconnect the wearer to spaces that are no longer accessible. My current project A Portrait of People in Motion looks at the role of objects in movement and migration, both voluntary and forced. The works in Heavy Metal explore my own experience with spatial displacement—both real and imagined.

3. As an artist, what is your most essential tool? Why?

My hands are my most essential tools. Making by hand is a way of thinking and learning that is not directly associated with intellect. I rely on proprioceptive interactions between my body and the material, leading me to act intuitively as I work.

I am obsessed with material and the information it can carry. I am inspired by the stories that objects can relate, authenticate, and enhance. I have made several bodies of work in this material-specific way of working. I explored communal sheep farming practices in the Orkney Isles, sugar farming in Hawaii, native copper mining in Ontonagon County, and derelict brickyards in New York’s Hudson Valley.

5. What is the last exhibition you saw that you had a strong reaction to?

I loved Dahn Vo: Take My Breath Away at the Guggenheim. He masterfully re-contextualizes objects in the physical space of the museum, allowing their historical significance to become an amalgam of new meaning and a new narrative. As a metalsmith, I think Vo’s We the Peopleis a must see!

The fifth installment of NMWA’s Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, is presented by the museum and participating national and international outreach committees. The exhibition showcases contemporary artists working in metal, including those who create sculpture, jewelry, and conceptual forms. Heavy Metal engages with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Works by French artist Charlotte Charbonnel often highlight invisible forces, like sound and magnetic waves. Charbonnel’s work focuses on “different visual qualities, the physical instability, and the acoustic properties of elements.”

Two of Charbonnel’s works in Heavy Metal,Petit colosse n°7 (2016) and Resonarium (2011), contain iron filings suspended in space by magnetism. Resonarium, in particular, demonstrates the strange way in which magnets can help metal defy gravity. The work’s central core rotates slowly on a motor while iron filings shift subtly, pulled by an invisible magnetic attraction. Viewers may find the work to have a magical, hypnotic quality.

Charbonnel is attracted to metal for its transformative qualities. “Metal, through its different states (powder, solid, and liquid) allows a transformation that I try to reveal in my work,” says the artist. “Because metal can transform from one state to another, it seems almost alive, organic.”

Charbonnel sees iron filings as “independent, mutable pieces until they come into contact with magnets.” She is interested in the way that the “resulting shape can evoke a mineral, an animal, or a fossil.” Charbonnel’s intriguing sculptures and installations blend science and art and highlight the enigmatic beauty of natural forces.